"The price of treating ignorant people who continue to smoke cigarettes and develop heart disease and lung cancer is also going through the roof. Hence the need to implement user pays strategy."
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Sure smoking is not good for you but I suspect that there's a fair bit of beat up in the whole campaign against it. As an example, three out of the six countries with longer life expectancies than Australia also have much higher cigarette consumption. There's no real correlation.
So, if it is really to be a user pays system then the ones who should really be hit hard are the clean living, non smoking, moderate drinking, fit ones as they are supposedly going to keep sucking money out of the government till they pop their clogs at a very ripe old age. The others will have very considerately died early after paying their taxes.
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"Would prefer my tax dollars were spent elsewhere than on helping people to dense to read and understand health warning....."
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Once those with that mentality have finished with the smokers, the drinkers are next in line for some creative cost recovery....(all the while cheered on by non drinkers),then the junk food du jour,except it's complicated,should the fat or the carbs be taxed? What else is there to tax for our own good in this nanny state...lack of exercise? Yearly BMI testing with a tax based on that? Where does it all stop?
Meanwhile my neighbour who grows his own weed sits back and laughs at it all cause he pays absolutely nothing....
